Iceland Last Batch of Photos ... until our return in September

 At the end of our week in Iceland, we immediately began planning a 3-day layover as part of our return flight back to the US after our tour of duty on El Galeon! There were just too many things we had wanted to see but just ran out of time. 

Tired old volcano

Welcome gnome at a random shop in town

Public art in Reykjavík: part Viking longboat and part sun salutation

Random street corner; there are more random street photos in the first photo dump

It’s dark-dark-dark for 5 months per year. I’ve never been anywhere that had so much sparkly artsy lighting in public spaces. (But all of it on motion sensors and LED).

Living their values, in this case living sustainably and eco consciously. Everyplace is heated with geothermal energy, and every hotel had 3 or 4 recycling/trash bins. Took us a bit to understand the system at the hotels also: there’s a slot on the wall where you insert your room key to activate room lights and other systems. No wasting power leaving lights on when you’re not there. Also, you don’t misplace your room key with this method. At the same time, heated bathroom floors and towel warmers are da bomb, jus’ sayin’

Okay, it wasn’t all perfect. Someone ran into our car’s back bumper while we were parked at one of the touristy spots and didn’t leave a note. (Thankfully we always make sure to get insurance). We got a flat tire on the last evening, and next morning the guy from the front desk had his friend come by to help us change it out for the emergency spare. (All the normal tire places were closed until Monday.) What lovely warm helpful people!!! It took a crew; those living nuts were right and the wheel didn’t want to let go of the axle. L to R: Dan, Brendan from Sri Lanka, Casshie (???) from Poland, and Lakmal also from Sri Lanka. (Does this make us high-maintenance tourists?) In the end it was just a slow leak and the rental company charged us a minimal amount. Worth it to learn how warm people can be in this chilly country.

View from our hotel window, at sunset. (Which was around 22:30! It started getting light again around 03:30, which totally whacked out my biorhythms.)

Iceland Diamond Beach and Glacier Photo Dump

 

This was the farthest east point on our drive along the south coast of Iceland before we turned around and headed back to Reykjavik and on to our next adventure. (For reasons I can't figure, these pictures posted in reverse-chronological order)

Here’s the glacial lagoon on the other side of the road, the source of the ice on Diamond Beach. If you look closely you can see another zebra iceberg.

Had some fun chatting with these tourists from Spain.

Bits of glacier break off and are swept out to sea, but the prevailing winds and currents bring them back to land and deposit them on this stretch of black sand beach, called Diamond Beach because of the sparkles.

Kinda hard to see. This river flood plain looks like it can carry a gigantic amount of water, but only a small glacial fed stream runs through it now. However, at some time in the past magma came up under the glacier, melting it from below. The water seeped towards the edge until it broke free all at once and caused a “glacial flood.”

You can almost get where those myths come from about goblins who were caught out by the first rays of sunlight in the morning and turned to stone. And btw times of sunrise and sunset can be hard to predict: the length of day increases by 3 hours between the first and last day of April. That’s huge! So maybe we can forgive the goblins being caught unaware by sunrise.

Lumpy lava supporting a thick carpet of moss. Yet another photo of a landscape that doesn’t look like it’s on Planet Earth.

Puffin! If I can’t have the real one I’ll take a statue.

Representation of the magma spike underlying Iceland

The “Lava Museum” may have been the best small science museum we’ve ever seen. And you guys all know how much we love local museums, the stories towns tell about themselves.

Iceland Church and Basalt Columns

 I’m emphatically NOT a church person but this building is beautiful. The structure is a nod to basalt columns. Also, some actual basalt columns on a black sand beach further east.

Iceland Glacier Hike

 

Lava rocks, carried by melting ice and deposited here, in the almost unpronounceable town of  · Kirkjubæjarklaustur, Iceland. We’re still on Planet Earth but from some of these landscapes you might not think so! (Plus, my Colorado hindbrain keeps insisting that if we’re in tundra with no trees we must be above 11,000 feet altitude and be careful the atmosphere is thin here. I don’t remember the numbers but it’s something like for every thousand feet of elevation it’s 10 degrees of latitude for climate.) 

I’m calling it a “zebra” iceberg. The alternate layers of black and white came about because the volcano spewed out black ash, then it snowed on top, then it spewed again, then it snowed, etc. The layers were horizontal originally but then it broke off and floated downstream on the spring melt until it fetched up here.

I’m gonna need a longer bucket list… glacier hike, check! (And one with our guide, the knowledgeable—and patient!—Elena)

We traded photo ops with another pair of visitors to Skogafoss waterfall. 

Last night at the hotel just after we’d gone to bed we heard some things falling and rattling. My first thought was mice, which was surprising because the place was otherwise immaculately clean. Nope, it was a small earthquake! Here’s a pic of the wall in the lobby showing layers from previous eruptions.